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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Monday, January 29, 2007

MOST of eastern Europe worries about its bad government. The Czech Republic's worry since the summer has been rather different: no functioning government at all. A general election in June produced a tied result, with a putative conservative-green coalition having exactly 100 MPs, and Social Democrat and Communist deputies the same number.

Last week, Mirek Topolanek, the leader of the main conservative party, the Civic Democrats (known by its Czech initials, ODS), squeaked through a confidence vote thanks to the absence of two renegade Social Democrat deputies. What inducements, personal or political, they may have received for this, is a subject of great speculation in the taverns of Prague.

So will Mr Topolanek's government be any good? And will it last? Its members are mostly a dispiritingly grey bunch, with a whiff of sleaze (like most previous Czech governments). But it boasts some stars, such as the foreign minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, a colourful and savvy Hapsburg aristocrat. It mixes those from the “truth and love” camp of the former president and dissident leader, Vaclav Havel, with the more hard-headed followers of his successor, Vaclav Klaus. Though divided on issues such as nuclear power and rights for Roma (gypsies), it seems clear on foreign policy. One early decision was to announce its willingness to provide a base for an American anti-missile radar (though the accompanying missiles will be based elsewhere, probably in Poland). In return, Czechs expect visa-free travel to America.

The pressing question is soggy public finances. Though GDP growth was around 6% last year, a government deficit of 3.7% of GDP in 2006 is likely to rise to 4.1% in 2007, taking the country way beyond the target needed to adopt the euro. Drastic reform of state administration and public services is needed, as well as of the pension system.

The government promises a flat tax, health-care charges and other liberalising moves. But other plans are sketchy, and in any case nothing will happen soon (drafting the laws will take six months). Worse, getting anything radical through parliament will be hard. Milos Melcak and Michal Pohanka, the two Social Democrat deserters, have not promised to back the coalition in future.

So why not call early elections? The ODS and its allies are ahead in the polls. But Mr Topolanek's own position in the party is shaky. An election could give his powerful rivals (who are backed by the abrasive Mr Klaus) a chance to strike.

Another possibility would be cross-party co-operation with the Social Democrats. Lubomir Zaoralek, one of their leading figures and a deputy speaker, says his party is always willing to compromise, but that the ODS is not: “If they behave arrogantly, it won't lead anywhere.”

The Czechs may have ended their humiliating political paralysis. But much deeper reform is needed than this fragile government seems likely to provide.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Europe.view ExodusJan 25th 2007 From Economist.comHow to vote no confidence, with your feetFORGET, for a moment, the headline stories from central and eastern Europe―the pipeline politics, the corruption scandals, the treasonous tycoons. The big story in the ex-communist world is people. Too few are being born. Too many are dying. And tens of millions have changed country.A recent World Bank report on outward migration from the former communist countries makes broadly comforting reading. For poor countries, it says, the benefits of remittances slightly outweigh the disadvantages of losing the brightest and best. As home labour markets tighten, fewer people will leave.The report recommends that governments make “circular” migration as easy as possible. People who know they can come and go again freely are more likely to take the chance of returning home.That may well be true. And the bank probably understates the benefits of migration to those who migrate, for example, in dispelling neuroses and learning new skills and languages. But the report—and much of the discussion around the issue—fails to deal adequately with the darker possibilities: chiefly, what happens if the exodus continues.As the bank rightly argues, it is not the prospect of higher wages alone that makes people move abroad. Quality of life plays a big role. Most ex-communist states neglect their customary duty to provide dependable health-care, good education, and the right sort of law and order (honest bureaucrats, friendly policemen, speedy justice).Bad public policy brings slow growth, less foreign investment, and worse public services. More people leave, making things even worse.Work is no refuge. Even if the pay is good, a job in an ex-communist countries can still be a pain when it comes to relations with bosses and colleagues. Cronyism, trickery and bullying are rampant.In all these respects, “old” Europe is far from perfect. But it is a lot better, especially for the young and ambitious.The big danger is a toxic circle in which migration and bad demographics combine with slow reform and bad government, causing failures in the labour market. The wage needed to persuade a Moldovan to come back from Italy or a Pole to come back from Britain may be too high for his putative employer to pay and stay in business.The wage needed to persuade a Moldovan to come back from Italy or a Pole to come back from Britain may be too high for his putative employer to pay and stay in businessEventually, of course the migration will stop, when the pickings for those that remain become sufficiently lucrative for them to stay. (It is not the last person to leave who turns off the lights, but those that remain, melting down the cables for their copper.) As talent drains away, brutality and cunning are what really counts. Whether democracy, a pro-Western orientation and a functioning market economy still survive by then is another question.Labour-market protectionism in western Europe won’t avert this gloomy outcome. Migrants will still come, and work illegally; or they will divert elsewhere. Better government at home is the right answer.That means rethinking what is meant by competitiveness. In the early post-communist years, it chiefly meant making things nice for employers, through flexible labour markets and business-friendly taxes.All that is still necessary. But so is something else: making things nice for workers, so that emigrants return and foreigners come in. That means not merely better public services, but a political elite that inspires trust and optimism. People will put up with a lot if they think the future looks bright.

Monday, January 22, 2007

ROBERT, the Polish-born head of a group of British removal men, can read and write English easily, unlike his British colleagues who after packing their cardboard boxes label them as “clovs” and “shuse”. Two years ago, when he moved to Britain, Robert lugged heavy loads like them. He still lives worse than they do, in a shabby rented house crammed with compatriots. But the remittances he sends home are paying for his family, a car, a house and—eventually—his own business there.

That dream, of hard work abroad leading to success at home, has inspired millions of people to move across Europe since the collapse of communism—a peacetime migration exceeded only by the upheavals that followed the end of the second world war. But remarkably little is known about the nature of this movement of people one way, and money the other, not least because so much is undocumented or illegal. Now a new report* from the World Bank attempts to fill some gaps and explode some misconceptions.

The first is that the main migration is from the ex-communist world to what used to be called the West, when in fact Russia is the main destination for immigrants, surpassed only by America. That is due partly to ethnic Russians returning to the motherland after the break-up of the Soviet Union, but also to Tajiks, Georgians, Moldovans and other non-Slav citizens of ex-Soviet republics moving to Russia in search of work. In the process, Georgia, for example, lost a fifth of its population in the 14 years from 1989.

The money-flows from migration—around $19 billion annually, the authors estimate—are surprising too. In some countries they matter more than foreign investment. For example, remittances make up more than a quarter of Moldova's GDP—a figure exceeded worldwide only in Haiti and Tonga. For nine ex-communist countries, remittances provide 5% or more of national income. In the region as a whole, three-quarters of the money comes from migrants working in the European Union; about a tenth from those in the former Soviet Union.

The big question is the impact on the home country's development. Optimists think that remittances prop up current accounts and help development. “Whereas aid to governments is often wasted or siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts, migrants' remittances end up directly in poor people's pockets,” says Philippe Legrain (formerly of The Economist) in a book† arguing the case for migration.

But pessimists reckon that having the best and brightest working abroad, often in menial jobs, is a dreadful loss. Remittances may also keep currencies artificially high, harming growth. The World Bank's authors think only a third of remittances go on education, savings and business investment. The overall result, they surmise, has been a mild stimulus to growth in the recipient countries, but without a measurable effect on poverty: it is better-off, urban families that tend to send someone abroad, and then reap the benefits.

The final misconception is about what motivates migration. “Everyone thinks it is all about income differentials, but actually it is all about expectations. Even in poor countries we can expect low levels of migration if people think that conditions there will improve,” argues Brice Quillin, one of the report's authors.

From one viewpoint, the huge migration of recent years to western Europe seems unlikely to continue. Populations are declining in all countries (except Albania) in the western half of the post-communist region. That tightens their labour markets and may stimulate migration from farther east. By contrast, populations in the southern states of the former Soviet Union—countries such as Tajikistan—will keep growing until the middle of this century. “If the typical migrant of the 1990s was a Pole moving to Britain, his successor in the next decade may be a Tajik moving to Poland,” says Mr Quillin. Even Turkey, previously a big exporter of workers, now imports migrants.

What really helps putative migrants stay at home is not just higher wages but the prospect of fast, effective reform, bringing better public services and a dependable legal system. Employers in post-communist countries, particularly those outside big cities with a local monopoly in the job market, still treat their employees with remarkable casualness. A sawmill in a small town, for example, may fail to pay wages, and then declare bankruptcy, only to restart under a new name with the same owners, managers and workforce.

The catch is that reform throughout the region is flagging. No country between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas can boast a strong reformist government, and with a few exceptions the farther east you go, the worse it gets.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

DEPENDING on your sympathies, your education and your historical experience, a giant bronze Soviet-era soldier in Tallinn, Estonia, may celebrate the liberation of the Estonian capital from fascism; or it may depict the “unknown rapist” in Soviet uniform whose arrival marked the end of one occupation and the start of another.

In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine (or Kyiv—even spelling can be controversial), the church of St Cyril is to some a precious symbol of Kievan Rus’‚ the fabled medieval principality from which both Ukraine and Russia claim descent; to others an obscure museum that badly needs a new coat of paint and proper management.

These are not academic arguments among historians. The Estonian parliament has infuriated Russia with a new law on war graves allowing the bronze soldier to be shifted to the suburbs.

Such a move would be “akin to the [Spanish] inquisition’s destruction of the texts and monuments of classical antiquity”, said Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Kremlin fixer and a grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who negotiated with the Nazis to divide Europe in 1939. From the upper house of the Russian parliament, Mikhail Margelov, another foreign-policy heavyweight, has called for a suspension of diplomatic relations.

A subtler clash of cultures is echoing through St Cyril’s, where the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, tied ecclesiastically to Russia, has influence. Moves may be afoot to redecorate the interior, which contains unique frescoes showing the life of St Cyril.

That thought has provoked anguish among Ukrainians who fear that their country's religious and cultural heritage is being bought, taken or spoiled by their neighbours to the north. They suspect Russian religious conservatives of wanting to do down Ukraine as a rival claimant to the spiritual and historical legacy of Kievan Rus’.

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A detail from St Cyril's

Even so, there ought at least to be common ground that the best thing to do with anything rare and fragile is to study it first. It is unbelievable if, as one scholar insists, the interior of St Cyril’s has not been exhaustively photographed and catalogued, the more so in a country with few surviving medieval monuments and with hardly any with iconographic evidence from the Byzantine period.

The argument over Estonia’s bronze soldier is both more banal and more visceral. It has been got up partly by the Reform Party, a member of the ruling coalition, which wants to burnish its patriotic credentials before parliamentary elections in March.

In a narrow sense it has succeeded. It has turned Estonians who reject everything about the Soviet era against Estonians with a lingering respect for the Red Army’s bravery.

But it is hard to argue that Estonia needs this argument right now, and even harder to argue that Estonia should be expending shamefully scarce diplomatic capital defending its behaviour abroad. Most Western countries reckon that war graves should be depoliticised where possible—though, even here, the facts are in dispute. Estonia says there are no Soviet war dead beneath the bronze soldier. Russia says there are.

For good measure the Estonian parliament may designate September 22nd, when Soviet forces captured Tallinn, a “resistance memorial day”; and penalise public display of both Nazi and Soviet symbols.

Fair enough, you might say. But there are so many other things which should have a prior claim on politicians’ attention. Look at the suspicious renationalisation of Estonia’s railways, the rampant corruption in parts of government, xenophobic migration laws, and foolish short-termism in party politics. Patriotism may not always be, as Dr Johnson once claimed, the last refuge of a scoundrel. But it does afford a convenient camouflage.

LONDON (or at least the bit of it that is interested in eastern European politics) was abuzz with unkind gossip after the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, came visiting in November. Of several awkward moments, the most talked-about was when he looked around the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street, and muttered something which his interpreter rendered as “Not very impressive”.

There are three baffling aspects to this. One is why Poland, the weightiest country in eastern Europe, managed to choose as head of state a man whose personal merits (honesty and kindness) are disguised by an ignorant, clumsy and nervous manner.

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Not very impressive

Another is why his staff are so utterly incompetent that they don’t provide him with some bland talking points.

The third is why the Polish government seems consistently to hire such lousy interpreters. Mr Kaczynski actually wanted to make a pleasant observation that it was a surprisingly small room for somewhere so important.

Poles who understand the damage done by such mistakes are gloomy. The government is not too bad—indeed it is probably one of the least bad that the country has ever had. But it is abominably bad at foreign policy.

To console them, your correspondent tells some horror stories from other countries. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia turned up nearly an hour late at Downing Street—a place where the prime minister’s day is timed to the minute.

But it is odd that Poland gets so much mockery. There is a kind of snobbish disdain for Europe’s east rooted very deeply in the British psyche. Before writing this diary, your correspondent was trying to do his expenses—a task that represents a weekly high-water mark for a journalist’s numeracy (and, it is rumoured, creativity).

The Economist’s internal expenses form allows claims in Zambian Kwacha—but not Estonian kroons, or lats (Latvia) or litas (Lithuania). These countries may be members of the EU and NATO, but for all that they are just not important enough. To say nothing of pipsqueak countries such as Ukraine.

There is some pressing business to end the week with. Literature from small countries, especially those that were wiped from the map for a few decades, tends to fare badly on the international publishing circuit.

Despite that, Estonia’s writers have a lot of clout for a country of 1.3m people. Jaan Kross (as in “The Czar’s Madman”) is internationally known. Tõnu Õnnepalu is a rising star. But the national classic, “Truth and Justice” by Anton Tammsaare, has never been published in English. That is a huge gap: rather as if Thomas Mann, Cervantes or Stendhal were not available in English.

“Truth and Justice” is a terrific tale, in five volumes, spanning rural farm life in Czarist-era Estonia, the Russian revolution and the creation of an independent Estonia.

The world it portrays seems as distant from ours as Atlantis. But the Estonians, taciturn, thoughtful, and dependable, are instantly recognisable.

There are translations in both German and Finnish. Rumour has it that there was once a translation into English, but it perished during a wartime shipwreck.

Now two Estonian-Americans, Inna Feldbach and Alan Trei, have translated the first volume and have sent some sample chapters of what they call the “sprawling, rambunctious” epic. A literary journal is publishing one of them, and the others are now with Random House in New York, and Arcadia Press in London.

It is addictive stuff, and a valuable Friday afternoon that should have been spent fixing interviews for next week’s paper slips by in a happy, melancholic haze. With luck the hard-nosed publishers will feel the same way. It would be a worthy addition to the Great Books list so animatedly discussed in Bratislava.

HOME again to London―the financial, cultural and diplomatic capital of eastern Europe. The city is a magnet for the ambitious, the desperate and the nervous, and for those just itching to have fun. By some counts it acommodates 500,000 expatriates from what your correspondent still likes to call the “former captive nations”. There could well be more.

It’s a new wave, but not the first. When your correspondent was first learning Polish in the mid-1980s, he frequented a café in South Kensington called Daquise, where he laboriously construed the label on a shabby collecting tin that sat next to the cash till. It was a quote from one of Poland’s great wartime leaders, General Wladyslaw Anders: “Legitymacja skarbu narodowego jest paszportem wolnego Polaku” (”The National Treasury ID card is the passport of a free Pole”).

Holders of those particular ID cards faced a death sentence if they returned to communist Poland, which regarded the government-in-exile that issued them as treasonous.

Now the members of that government, for which the tin raised a tiny, voluntary tax, have wound up triumphant. They, not their communist usurpers, are honoured by Poland's current rulers, as the legitimate government of that day.

It was a time when east European languages were deeply exotic, and finding people to practise them with was quite hard. The smart way to get a cheap conversation lesson was by buying drinks for the mustachioed gents who used to hang around Daquise, or the Polish Hearth Club up the road.

Now, by contrast, east European languages are so common on the London street that they barely register. But few of their speakers imagine that any local (and in his tweed jacket, corduroys, brogues and Barbour jacket, your correspondent could hardly look more English) will understand what they are saying.

At a bus stop, a Russian chats animatedly into a mobile phone about a scam involving over-invoicing. On the bus, two Polish girls are comparing notes on their sex life with laudable frankness.

A bit later, on the tube, three Lithuanians are discussing a complicated and dodgy-sounding business to do with a container, some forged documents, and a British “colleague”. They create the dismal impression that they have corrupted a customs officer.

After a bit the eavesdropping gets rather conspicuous, and they look at the unwanted observer with undisguised dislike. They switch to Russian, which this eavesdropper understands rather better. Sadly, they get off at the next stop.

Merely speaking Russian doesn’t mean that you understand Russians. For that, start with one of the best books ever written about the Communist mindset, “Negotiating with the Soviets”, by Raymond Smith, first published in 1989.

The author, a retired American diplomat who spent his working life in dull, intricate, pointless talks with Soviet bureaucrats, explains beautifully the difference between two kinds of Russian truth―istina which is what is factually true, and pravda, which is the “right truth”.

He explains the use of vranyo—an untranslatable word meaning, roughly, “useful bullshit”. And, perhaps most usefully, he outlines the three ways of dealing with strangers: befriend, bully or grovel.

The normal Western conversational register, of friendly, respectful professional interaction is much rarer, particularly among Soviet-born people of a certain age.

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Mourning Mr Litvinenko

An example: your correspondent leaves a message with a famous Soviet-era defector, now living in the UK, asking whether he and other cold war fence-jumpers are nervous in the wake of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asks brusquely. He interrupts the explanation. “I don’t talk to the KGB”, he erupts. “Your paper is full of communist propaganda. Your correspondents are KGB officers. Sack them.”

This line of attack is rather disconcerting, given that our general line on Russia is quite hawkish, and your correspondent's, if anything, more so. But still he thinks the paper’s coverage of Mr Litvinenko’s death was insufficiently reverential.

He rants on. One option is to counter-attack, berating him for his foolish and ignorant views. But that is risky. He is a lot older, and considers himself a lot grander. Another is to whine and apologise, let him enjoy some trampling, and then appeal for mercy. The third is try to befriend him.

But a fourth option looks more attractive still. As he reaches a fulminating crescendo of insults, explaining for the third time why he will not talk to Moscow’s flunkeys, it is time to apologise crisply for bothering him and then, as he pauses, slightly startled, add a swift goodbye and hang up. It wasn’t that interesting a story anyway.

TO BUDAPEST, and the Gellert hotel. A favourite of your correspondent. Note the eccentric plumbing, the peeling paint and the worn carpets. The service ranges from sombre to sullen. Here you can see all the tide-marks left in the course of Hungary’s transition from goulash communism to debt-laden crony capitalism.

But the history, architecture and atmosphere outweigh such cavils. The visitor is not quite standing on the shoulders of giants, but at least standing in rooms they frequented. The Gellert is where Oskar Schindler stayed when saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

The hotel manages, just, to feel like an oddly-run bit of a market economy. But a trip down the corridors to the Gellert's thermal baths, still municipally owned, brings with it an unmistakable whiff of the bossy, dour regime that collapsed in 1989.

In, say, Estonia, this gorgeous Art Deco swimming pool would have been privatised long ago, renovated, and turned into a world-class health resort for the super-rich.

In a city with a more dynamic municipal government, it might at least be run by friendly English-speaking staff.

But it isn’t. And for the foreign visitor, one of the great experiences of Budapest can seem a bit daunting. So here’s what to do.

Pad down the corridor and summon the antique lift, all ironwork and glass. The female attendant will give you a faded plastic swipe card to get you through the turnstiles thronged by glum-looking Budapesters intent on sweating away their troubles.

Here you will catch a tempting glimpse of the swimming pool to your right, though you get there via a roundabout tunnel worthy of a car park.

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The way of Buda

Swimming is strictly anti-clockwise. Backstroke is recommended so that you can see the ceiling. Grecian urns and lions’ heads spouting water evoke a more elegant age―which is more than you can say for the podgier of the clientele.

Now for the real treats. Head right (men) or left (women) and you reach a warren of cubicles and passages. Collect a “modesty cloth” from the freshly laundered pile on the table, and find a vacant cabin to change. An attendant (monoglot and cross) will lock away your possessions for safe keeping and give you a tiny metal tag to wear round your ankle.

Proceed to the dry sauna with its three circles of hell. The hottest is 80ºC. Hungarians sit stolidly reading newspapers, or conversing in their (to outsiders) impenetrable tongue. Some are in their underwear, others in modesty cloths. The etiquette is to switch this round when you sit, so that your bare bottom does not rest directly on a wooden chair.

After a bit of that, head for the two plunge pools, heated to 36ºC and 38ºC, or go for a bracing wallow in the cold pool. Disappointingly for aficionados of the Russian banya, which follows a long bake with a serious freeze, the cold pool here is cooled to a mere 8ºC.

Once your extremities are losing all feeling, warm up again in the “wet” (steam) sauna next door. Nobody reads or talks here. Breathing is painful, and you can’t see across the room.

The tantalising “mud treatment”, whatever the hotel may say, is not available at weekends. To get it at all you need a doctor’s letter certifying to your general good health, and to your particular need of spa treatments for fatigue and digestive problems.

But there are beauty treatments requiring nothing more than cash—around €50 for an hour of facial patting and prodding with anti-wrinkle potions, an extraction of blackheads (by hand) and other pleasurable if scientifically unproven remedies. Your correspondent's wife, who believes her husband to spend most of his time overseas in a muddy wasteland where starving dogs gnaw at frozen corpses, was delighted, pronouncing it “blissful”. Wait until we get to a Moscow banya.

The baths will shoo you out in good time for dinner. Take the hint. Hungarian cuisine is the best anywhere in the ex-communist world, with sophisticated combinations of duck, goose, sour cherries and chestnuts, instead of the cabbage, sausage and potato of most other countries.

But some local delicacies are better than others. Lung casserole is rather like eating rubber bands. Catfish, especially when stewed, taste like the lake-bottom on which they live.

THE conference on post-communist Europe is a rare gem, with short papers, lively discussions, and lots of time for socialising. The wildly varying levels of informality are striking. Some people have been friends for 20 years: they use “ty”, and diminutive forms of address―“Honza” for Jan, “Edicko” for Edward.

Others are meeting for the first time, and want to be friendly without rushing it. Luckily, it is much easier to be informal in English, where speedy use of a Christian name doesn’t signify forced intimacy.

A Serbian diplomat will have none of this. Steely in manner, appearance and views, she insists on addressing her interlocutors at every point as “Esteemed” followed by their job title. The crosser she gets with our more cavalier approach, the more formal she becomes.

A spare hour presents a chance to call an actress, Ingrid T. She comes highly recommended by a journalist colleague, now in New York, who spent many years in post-communist Czechslovakia. He is something of a Casanova, but gives no hint of any romantic entanglement.

The conversation goes like this. “Hello, this is X from The Economist. I am in Bratislava and wanted to discuss the interaction between Slovak cultural identity and global influences. I got your number from Peter in New York”. At this point the call is interrupted by a peal of derisive, incredulous laughter, followed by a click. It is tempting to phone New York for an explanation. But perhaps better not to.

Over dinner, four of us, all from outside the region, discuss what first sparked our lifelong interest in the now ex-communist world, back when it seemed as inaccessible as Pyongyang seems today. The common answer: books.

The captivating Milosz

This prompts an attempt to construct a reading list, on the lines of an American-style Great Books course.

You have to start with Kundera, says one colleague. “Grossly overrated,” says another, who insists, “Skvorecky is infinitely better”. There is a measure of agreement that Czech fiction is a big part of the canon: Klima, of course, Hrabal, Capek … Someone mentions Havel. “Nobody would have heard of him if he wasn’t a dissident too” comes the squashing retort.

A Pole, eavesdropping, weighs in: “You can’t understand anything unless you have read ‘Pan Tadeusz’.” But like the Koran, “Pan Tadeusz”—a captivating 19th century romantic epic by Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz—is untranslatable. After some debate, Czeslaw Milosz’s “Captive Mind” is chosen as the greatest Polish book accessible to non-Polonophones.

Your correspondent counters with his childhood reading of books by English authors. Evelyn Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy shows the moral roots of the cold war with almost unbearable poignancy. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” tries to explain pre-war Yugoslavia. Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy” does the same for Romania.

There are funny books too. Malcolm Bradbury’s “Rates of Exchange”, set in the fictional but all too recognisable east European country of Slaka (part-Yugoslavia, part-Soviet), made bad food and intrusive officialdom seem amusing, rather than threatening. His follow-up spoof guidebook, “Why come to Slaka” tells you a lot you need to know about the last decaying decade of communist rule.

The prize for obscurity goes to “The Foolish Virgin”, a slight, long-forgotten novel by an enterprising British nurse, Violetta Thurstan. It tells the story of an idealistic, prickly English girl who works in Austrian refugee camps in the late 1940s.

The plot and characterisation are tosh, but the background, drawn with unselfconscious precision, gives an extraordinarily convincing picture of the squalid, fearful world of displaced-person camps, administered by worn-out soldiers in a ruined country. The cold war is palpable, but has yet to be named for what it is. Plucked from a bookshelf by a bored, lonely 12-year-old, it awoke a spark of interest in the history and politics of eastern Europe that has burned ever since.

MY VISITS to Bratislava always have a faintly penitential air. It was here 17 years ago, covering what was then communist Czechoslovakia, that I made probably the biggest of my many professional misjudgments. Writing about a court case on November 13th 1989 in which Slovakia’s top dissidents were being sentenced on a trumped-up charge of subversion, I wrote: “The likelihood that any of the defendants might one day argue with the authorities across a negotiating table rather than a courtroom seemed distant.”

Barely a week later the Velvet Revolution was under way.

In those days Bratislava was an isolated, scary place. Now it is at the centre of Europe―despite Slovakia's latest government, which unites racists and sleazy populists in an unholy alliance.

My visit this time was for a conference about the political weakness of post-communist countries—a worrying trend. From the Baltics to the Balkans there is not one strong reformist government. Some are smug, do-nothing coalitions (Estonia and Slovenia), or prickly and ineffective (Poland) or powerless minority governments (Lithuania, Czech Republic), or sleazy and unscrupulous (Hungary, Latvia).

The evening gave a chance to go to Nitra, an hour’s drive away, to watch an avant-garde British play at a theatre festival. The theatre, a hideous monolith, was packed. The play was very funny. But the overtitles projected on the proscenium arch were unnervingly out of synch. Sometimes they delivered the jokes before the actors did, and the half-dozen native-speakers in the audience roared with solitary laughter. Sometimes it was the other way round.

Afterwards there was a slow, late and rather formal dinner for the honoured British guests. My conversational Slovak is improvised from long-forgotten Czech plus protoslavonic borrowings from Russian and Polish. But it seemed to work, thanks to the patience of our Slovak hosts.

Please tie bridegrooms elsewhere

The trick in speaking a language badly is to have a few good questions at hand. In Russian you might try, “Shchto to znachit konkretno?” (what does that mean in practical terms?), or “U vas jest jarky primyer?” (do you have a vivid example?). If you know local variants of those questions you can keep offering them with a friendly, puzzled smile, and in the end your interlocutor will get out a pen and paper and draw you a cartoon strip in order to get the point across.

Back to Bratislava, where the vibrant culture of young British manhood is enlivening the beautiful old town centre. Stag parties fuelled by cheap alcohol and low-cost airlines are the curse of eastern Europe. Sometimes they can be quite amusing: a friend tells of a hapless bridegroom who was stripped naked and wrapped, immobile, to a tree with clingfilm. But mostly it is noise, vomit, urine and vulgarity.

The other big interest is property speculation. Brits like talking about house prices even more than they like talking about the weather. Knowledge of the topography, regulatory environment, climate and architecture of eastern Europe is now at an all-time high. People who would have not found Bratislava on the map ten years ago can explain exactly which provincial town in Slovakia offers the best “upside”, and the pitfalls of buying a cottage in a Bulgarian mountain village.

There’s a more cerebral, though equally self-interested, strand of interest too. The hard-pressed British middle classes, squeezed by rising taxes, stonking increases in the cost of education and stagnant real incomes, are fascinated by the thought of paying a flat-rate 20% income tax (instead of the 40% marginal rate they currently suffer). It is an odd experience to hold a London dinner party enthralled with a detailed comparison of the Estonian and Slovak tax systems. But it happens surprisingly often.

On January 7th, at the mass that was meant to mark his investiture as metropolitan archbishop of Warsaw, he tearfully announced that he was stepping down. After a month of rumour and a week of media hysteria, the Roman Catholic hierarchy publicly conceded that their candidate's past collaboration with the secret police was far more than the casual contacts he had previously admitted. These, he said, had been the price for scholarly trips abroad in the 1970s.

For the Pole in the pew, this is sickening. The Catholic church has been the repository of national feeling under centuries of foreign occupation and totalitarian rule. John Paul II, the previous pope, was the country's most honoured son, and ranks along with Ronald Reagan in the pantheon of anti-communist heroes.

Now a landslide of resignations is rumbling. Monsignor Wielgus was quickly followed by Janusz Bielanski, dean of Cracow's Wawel Cathedral, who faces similar allegations but also protests his innocence. The church estimates that a tenth of its priests were informers; others think that the proportion is higher.

Previously, this was covered up—perhaps to spare the feelings of John Paul. Now those who favour openness say they will expose errant colleagues who do not confess. A priest in Cracow, Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, is publishing a book exposing the collaboration of dozens of clergy, some of them senior. Such notes of contrast may ultimately make the church's image of picturebook heroics and saintliness more convincing. But they are a painful shock nonetheless.

Some pious Poles, particularly those close to the battily ultra-conservative (and unofficial) Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja, believe that Monsignor Wielgus, an ally of theirs, is the victim of a plot by liberals, foreigners and (inevitably) Jews. But there are serious questions too. How could Pope Benedict have approved the candidacy of someone with such a shady past? If he didn't know, it suggests scandalous naivety and incompetence in his staff. That seems implausible, given that the Vatican's intelligence network in Poland has been formidable in the past.

If he knew and proceeded, it suggests recklessness or cynicism. Was the pope swayed by personal ties (he has known Monsignor Wielgus for three decades)? If so, that was a blunder comparable to his inept linking of Islam and violence. Perhaps he thought that the new Polish government's enthusiasm for screening public figures for links to the communist authorities was overdone. The pope said in Poland last spring that nobody should “sit in judgment on other generations.” After the first revelations late last year, the Vatican press office said on December 21st that the pope had “taken into consideration all the circumstances of [Monsignor Wielgus's] life” and still had “full confidence” in him.

On January 5th Vatican Radio was still assuring listeners that the archbishop would be invested as planned. Vatican sources said the pope decided the candidate should be “earnestly requested” to resign only late on Saturday, after reading a dossier that had apparently been sent from Warsaw in late December. Now the Vatican is pleading ignorance. “When Monsignor Wielgus was appointed, we did not know anything about his collaboration,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who heads the Vatican ministry dealing with bishops, protested this week. These statements are hard to reconcile.

The scandal raises equally uncomfortable questions for Poland's ruling Kaczynski twins, Lech (president) and Jaroslaw (prime minister). They want Poland to make a clean break from the communist past and hoped that vetting would reveal their liberal opponents' sleazy ties with the old order. It is a fair bet that they did not expect it to damage their allies in the church. Senior figures such as Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the primate of Poland, are now, oddly, echoing ex-communist complaints that vetting is a pretext for witch-hunts. The cardinal says that Monsignor Wielgus had no chance to defend himself and that the alleged collaboration was “unimportant” if it took place under duress.

The truth is that opening poisonous, unreliable communist-era archives anywhere risks ruining innocent lives: they include malicious gossip, and private secrets. But keeping them locked up encourages manipulation and blackmail, and lets off the perpetrators of revolting betrayal. That is a problem worthy of the church's finest moral philosophers.

The row with Russia shows how much Europe needs to liberalise its energy markets

Peter Shrank

ENERGY is so important that it must be treated differently. That is the easy and seductive argument of Europe's “national champions”—firms like E.ON of Germany and EDF of France. Only vertically integrated monopolies, they argue, can guarantee secure supply, by investing enough in local grids and capacity, and by using their might to strike advantageous long-term deals with powerful outside suppliers, like Russia.

The European Commission, rightly, sees this argument as not just self-serving but dangerous. Energy monopolies and cartels do not like deep, liquid markets that turn energy into a commodity. They like energy islands, which allow them to extract premium prices from consumers. So they do not invest in the vital interconnectors that allow energy to flow from places where it is cheap and plentiful to where it is costly and scarce. That's why it is so hard for gas-poor Germany to import from the neighbouring, gas-rich Netherlands.

Worse, the supposedly secure long-term deals negotiated by the national champions have proved flimsy. Germany, particularly under its previous left-wing government, cultivated embarrassingly close ties with Vladimir Putin's Russia in the name of energy security. But this did not stop the Kremlin casually cutting off oil supplies to Germany (and other European countries) this week as it tried to bring its errant satellite of Belarus to heel in a row over pipeline transit costs (see article). Last winter in a spat with Ukraine it cut the gas off.

Russia likes to say that it is a reliable partner—and the dispute with Belarus was soon over—but Moscow is reliable only when it wants to be. A combination of political shenanigans and a looming shortage of gas (because of bad management and under-investment) hardly makes Russia look like a dependable partner, especially if you care about consumers, not producers. Cosy deals with Russian energy giants such as Gazprom may suit their Western counterparts; but such murky, inflexible arrangements are bad for customers.

That is why the second leg of the commission's energy strategy, a strategic review also unveiled this week, is so important. It wants to use EU money and political clout to build interconnecting pipelines and power lines, such as electricity hook-ups between Germany, Poland and Lithuania and between France and Spain.

Even more importantly, the commission underlines the need for diversity of supply. One important new route is the Nabucco pipeline which aims to connect Europe with gasfields in the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia via the Balkans and Turkey. That bypasses Russia altogether, greatly strengthening Europe's bargaining position, regardless of how much gas it actually carries. Similarly, Europe needs to build more terminals for the import of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The best way of achieving this is to have a competitive, liberalised market. It is no coincidence that Britain, which has gone furthest in this respect, has the most diverse supply, the strongest infrastructure (including new LNG terminals) and—over the past decade—the lowest prices.

Still, taking on the national energy champions is a formidable task. They represent some of the most powerful interests in the EU's largest countries. They are a rich source of sinecures and other comfort for the political classes. The appointment of a former German chancellor, immediately after leaving office, to the lucrative chairmanship of a Russian-German energy firm would have seemed fancifully scandalous until recently, when it happened. Gerhard Schröder heads the firm building a new undersea gas pipeline linking Russia to Germany.

The commission, to its credit, is pushing for the national champions to be broken up (see article), although it has given them an escape route: they can stay in one piece if they hive off the management of the grid to a third party. That looks a poor second best, because the giants would still own the transmission system, but it is better than nothing. The crucial test would be whether these new “independently managed” arms moved to build interconnectors. That would not just help secure supply for their hapless consumers; it would be a sign that the big utilities are prepared to compete with each other. There is a powerful disincentive for them to invade each other's islands at the moment, because the invader has to queue up to use the incumbent's transmission networks.

When EU ministers consider the commission's proposals in March, they should remember that energy is indeed important and that governments should indeed treat it differently. But that difference should be in using the state's armoury of powers to take on their own champions, not stifling competition in the name of a bogus security. Otherwise, you had better trust Mr Putin.

“TO THOSE who in their homeland have no freedom, and to those who in their freedom have no homeland.” That toast was drunk by countless east European émigrés during the decades of communism, when few dreamed their captive countries would regain freedom so dramatically.

Even fewer would have imagined that, nearly 20 years after the collapse of communism, émigré communities would be supplying three presidents (in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and half a dozen ministers elsewhere.

In the early post-communist years returning émigrés tended to do well because they had contacts and clout, or because they had first-hand knowledge of the systems that their homelands wanted to emulate.

In 1990 Pauls Raudseps, a young American-Latvian, helped found Diena, his country's new Western-style daily newspaper, not because he was an experienced journalist, but because he had read Western papers and knew what they ought to look like.

Locals responded to those who came back with a mixture of admiration, envy and resentment. Stasys Lozoraitis, Lithuania's charming and able top émigré diplomat, returned home in 1993 to contest a presidential election after a lifetime spent representing a vanished country. But he was easily defeated.

Lithuanians, poverty-stricken in the wake of the Soviet collapse, doubted that a suave cosmopolitan, married to a sexy Italian aristocrat, could understand their problems. Instead they chose a reassuring, stodgy ex-Communist―a mistake that cost them dearly.

Sometimes suspicions were well-founded. Chancers, losers and nutters who had failed in the real world saw a wonderful chance to reinvent themselves as “experts” on security, finance or public relations. They were soon squeezed out by more competent locals.

Moments of friction arise still. The appointment of Karel Schwarzenberg as foreign minister in the Czech Republic's latest temporary government has infuriated the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus.

Mr Schwarzenberg is head of one of the old Hapsburg empire's grandest families. He has lived most of his life in Austria, where his family fled after the Soviet-backed communist putsch of 1948.

Arch-patriots for their lost homeland, the family continued to speak Czech in exile. The new foreign minister thus speaks a fine archaic Czech redolent of cultured, solid, pre-war Czechoslovakia, rather than the debased version that developed under communist rule.

Mr Klaus's vituperative attacks on Mr Schwarzenberg's supposed foreignness seem to come straight from the 19th-century heyday of Czech nationalism, when the country was struggling to reassert its identity in the Hapsburg empire, and the greatest enemies of a Czech patriot were Germans, priests and nobles.

Mr Schwarzenberg is not a priest, but in Mr Klaus's eyes he is something even worse. When he returned home after the collapse of communism in 1989 he became a senior aide to Mr Klaus's more engaging predecessor, and arch-foe, Vaclav Havel. For Mr Klaus that puts him in the camp of elitist, soggy-liberal, unpatriotic elements.

EPA

Too foreign a minister?

The new minister has been nominated by the Czech Greens, a pragmatic outfit quite unlike their woolly-minded Western namesakes. He is not a member of the party, but running the Schwarzenberg estates has given him an excellent knowledge of modern, environmentally sensitive forestry, he notes.

His gravitas, salty humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of the region deserve better than the brief appearance they look likely to make in the dreary saga of deadlocked and stillborn governments that has constituted politics since the Czech Republic's tied election in June.

The incapacity of the Czech system to produce a robust, well-functioning government exemplifies the condition of post-communist politics across the region. The politicians lose themselves in squabbling, self-interest and short-termism; the voters shun them. The best to be said about the resulting instability is that it does, occasionally, give class acts from the outside, such as Prince Karl XVII von Schwarzenberg (to give him his Austrian title), a chance to shine.

Friday, January 05, 2007

STAR in the making: Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia. Suave, savvy and cynical, this Swedish-born, American-educated political heavyweight has returned from a big job at the European Parliament to put his pint-sized country on the map. Whether delivering the West’s message to Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (“Misha: just shut the **** up”), charming George Bush, or hobnobbing with Carl Bildt, his Swedish foreign-minister chum, Mr Ilves had a flying start in 2006 and will be the ex-captive nations’ best spokesman in 2007.

Biggest disappointment: Poland’s Law and Justice government, which wasted most of 2006 in political intrigue. The dropping of a popular prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, was an unforgivable display of jealousy by Law and Justice’s party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. His own lacklustre and devious performance in the top job has since highlighted his predecessor’s merits. Poland’s prickly and incompetent foreign policy is a black hole in the heart of Europe.

Most worrying trend: Between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas there is not a single strong reforming government. Drift, muddle and sleaze were the hallmarks of 2006. Internal and external pressure ought to bring better government—but in some countries political meltdown is a serious danger. Russia’s divide-and-rule policy, of flattery, cheap gas and bribes, is nobbling Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovenia. Post-communist elites are wired for quick deals and personal gain, not long-term national interest. The Kremlin knows this.

Politics of the gutter award: Given jointly to Ferenc Gyurcsany, prime minister of Hungary, for admitting that his government had lied, and for turning a blind eye to police brutality; and to Hungary's opposition leader, Viktor Orban, for cynical populism and mystifyingly authoritarian socialist-style policies.

Unsung heroes: Another joint award, to Gediminas Kirkilas, Lithuania’s prime minister, whose minority administration has surpassed all expectations; and to his old friend and ally, the conservative opposition leader, Andrius Kubilius. A rare example of personal friendship and patriotism surmounting party interest.

Loser: Abandoned by the West, and with a defeatist political elite unable to look beyond Russia, Moldova is sinking. If any post-communist country faces real collapse, it is this one. Nothing seems to be working in its favour, save that its neighbour, Romania, has just joined the EU.

Eurocrat of the year: Andris Piebalgs, the EU’s energy commissioner, a sparkling advertisement for the post-communist countries’ political abilities. Unlike most of his fellow commissioners, he understands both the technicalities of his brief and its political dimensions, and has the nerve to take on the powerful energy lobbies in Europe’s biggest countries who are as contemptuous of politicians as they are cowardly towards Russia. Clone him.

Most clubbable country: Slovenia, post-communist Europe’s most prosperous state, has joined the euro-zone, proving that the common currency need not remain an “old Europe” club. A cautious sort of place: Slovenes talk like Estonians, but act like Austrians.

Soggy bottom: Croatia’s sullen and obstructive approach to pluralism, media freedom and the rule of law remains an alarming pothole on the road to further EU enlargement. Nobody wants to upset the murky and convenient status quo.

Symbolic triumph: Radek Sikorski, Poland’s defence minister, switched his ministry’s entire wine order to Georgia. If the Georgian wine industry gets its act together on quality control and deliveries, that will be the tipple of choice to celebrate 2008.

Big question: East-west migration. The worst-governed ex-communist countries have lost a million people or more to emigration. Now local job markets are tight, and wages are rising, but not enough to attract many migrants back. The opportunities and the quality of government are still so much better in western Europe. Until that gap narrows, worries of depopulation in the east, and overcrowding in the west, will grow.

THIS book may not change your life. But if you have a tendency to be messy and have already broken your new year resolutions to be neater in future, it will certainly make you feel better about your natural inclinations. Untidiness, hoarding, procrastination and improvisation are not bad habits, the authors argue, but often more sensible than meticulous planning, storage and purging of possessions.

That is because the tidiness lobby counts the benefits of neatness, but not its costs. A rough storage system (important papers close to the keyboard, the rest distributed in loosely related piles on every flat surface) takes very little time to manage. Filing every bit of paper in a precise category, with colour-coded index tabs and a neat system of cross-referencing, will certainly take longer. And by the end, it may not save any time. Your reviewer's office is easily the most untidy in The Economist (not entirely his own work, it should be said, thanks to the heroic efforts of his even untidier office-mate). But when it comes to managing information, there seems to be no discernible difference in the end result.

The authors of this book trawl the furthest reaches of psychology, management studies, biology and physics to show why a bit of disorder is good for you. Chiefly, it creates much more room for coincidence and serendipity. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he was notoriously untidy, and didn't clean a petri dish, thus allowing fungal spores to get to work on bacteria. He remarked wryly on visiting a colleague's spotless lab: “no danger of mould here”.

It can also help make sense of things. Hearing depends on random movement of molecules: when they coincide with sounds from outside, they are strong enough to stimulate the inner ear. A bit of background noise on the phone enables our ears to filter out echoes. A slightly mushy photograph can be easier to understand. Music and art depend on mess.

Procrastination makes sense too. America's Marine Corps, the authors repeat (several times), never makes detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all.

The authors are witheringly contemptuous of the bogus equation of tidiness and morality—for example in corporate “clean desk” policies. Disorder and creativity are so closely linked that any employer who penalises the first sacrifices the second, they argue. America's professional organisers, a thriving and lucrative cult of tidiness coaches, are merchants of guilt, not productivity boosters.

It's all fine, up to a point. But the book has two weaknesses. One is that it overstates the case. The case for tidiness in some environments—surgery, a dinner table or income tax returns—is really overwhelming. The other is that the book is a bit repetitive and disorganised. Even readers who love mess in their own lives don't necessarily like it in others.

The European Union's two newest members, Bulgaria and Romania, are both economically and politically backward

WILL it work again? It is tempting to join the revellers in Bucharest and Sofia who seem to believe that European Union membership promises untold riches. The eight ex-communist states that joined in 2004 have done pretty well. Bulgaria and Romania are already growing strongly; EU money will help.

Yet the Balkan pair differ from their predecessors. Bulgaria's GDP per head in 2005 was only $3,480 and Romania's $4,490—against $9,240 for the eight entrants in 2004, and an EU-wide average of $29,330. And they are backward in many other ways. Infrastructure and public services are worse than in the rest of eastern Europe; corruption is more entrenched, and the political culture more fragile.

Although united by weak institutions and their poverty, Bulgaria and Romania differ in size, history, politics and economic structure. Romania, with some 22m people, is the second-biggest eastern European country after Poland. Bulgaria is just over a third as big. This could be a plus, as small countries' elites often work better. But Romania's political class has recently outscored Bulgaria's. Big countries also matter more to foreign investors.

Both countries are on the edge of the EU, but whereas Bulgarians feel out of the mainstream, Romanians do not. They see themselves as a Latin outpost in a sea of Slavs. Their language is linked to Italian and French. Bulgarian is a Slavic tongue, as close to Russian as Danish is to Swedish.

Each has a sizeable ethnic minority from a neighbour. In Romania some 7% of the population are ethnic Hungarians. The Hungarian minority's party, the HDUR, is a fixture in coalition governments, which has blunted its reforming edge. About 9% of Bulgaria's population are ethnic Turks, poorer and less educated than their fellow citizens. Their party, led by Ahmed Dogan, is a frequent target of complaints by anti-corruption campaigners. Both countries also have big Roma (gypsy) populations, often living in abominable conditions, worse than under communism.

The Balkan pair view Russia differently. Bulgarians thanked Tsarist Russia for liberating them from the Ottomans, and many recall communist rule as a time of modernisation. To Romanians, Russia is a predator. It took an eastern province from them in 1812. Romania regained it in 1918 and lost it again to the Soviet Union in 1940-41. This region, plus a strip of land bordering Ukraine, is now Moldova.

Romania, under its president, Traian Basescu, is a bastion of Atlanticism in the Black Sea region. Bulgaria is largely passive in foreign policy, though it has good relations with Russia. Bulgaria's prime minister, Sergei Stanishev, studied in Moscow; past Romanian leaders did so too, but to admit it now would spell political doom. Mr Basescu decries communism as criminal, but Bulgarian leaders only mumble.

In politics, Romania is noted for the recurrent conflict between Mr Basescu and his prime minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu. Only the need to get into the EU has held Mr Basescu's Democratic Party together in government with Mr Tariceanu's National Liberal Party. In Bulgaria the prime minister and president come from the same party. But the coalition combines the Socialists (ex-communists), quasi-monarchists led by former King Simeon II and Mr Dogan's lot. Elections may take place in both countries this year.

Joining the EU has meant intense pressure to meet Brussels standards, which neither country yet does. The biggest worry is lawlessness. In Romania this takes the form of corruption; in Bulgaria, of organised crime. Criminal-justice systems are weak, and high-level sleaze widespread. Romania has made more progress: its non-party justice minister, Monica Macovei, is an effective administrator who has shaken up the structure and accountability of the judiciary and the prosecutor's office.

Bulgaria has moved more slowly. Some politicians still seem untouchable, as do some organised-crime groups. A recent OECD study rates Bulgaria higher for investment promotion, but Romania higher on anti-corruption and business integrity. Some senior Romanian officials and politicians have lost their jobs and even their freedom. The investigation of a former prime minister, Adrian Nastase, is a contrast to the immunity that Bulgaria's political class still enjoys.

Managers with experience in both countries say that Romanians are more individualistic than Bulgarians. “In Romania the problem is getting them to work in a team. In Bulgaria the problem is getting them to show any initiative,” says one. Higher education is bureaucratic and complacent. Infrastructure is dire; transport links between the two countries are awful, with just one road bridge across the Danube. A big road programme in Romania is bogged down in tendering scandals. Improvements will take EU cash, which may add 2% to GDP in 2007-13. It is hard to be confident that it will be well spent.

The main macroeconomic difference is that Romania's currency floats, whereas Bulgaria's is pegged to the euro. Both countries have huge current-account deficits: Bulgaria's was some 13.5% of GDP in 2006, Romania's 10.3%. Continuing inflation means that euro adoption is at least a decade away. Romania's demographic outlook is good by post-communist standards, with only a mild population decline that is expected to slow as income levels and health care improve. But Bulgaria's is one of the worst in eastern Europe: its population will fall below 7m by 2020.

Then there is emigration, encouraged by low pay, poor working conditions and bad public services. As many as 2m Romanians and 800,000 Bulgarians live abroad. Entry into the EU may stimulate emigration, though most existing members have slapped on temporary labour-market restrictions. That is partly because immigrants from Poland and other countries were more numerous than expected.

Both countries' borders are leaky. Moldovans can work easily (if not always legally) in Romania, as can Macedonians in Bulgaria. Although the two governments try to restrict the issue of passports to ethnic kinsfolk in these neighbours, they cannot stop them coming.

Romania has the advantage of size, demography and a newly confident elite that wants to put the country on the map of Europe. Bulgaria has a stronger industrial base. But given the political chaos that has taken hold in other eastern European countries, most of them much richer and stronger than the two newcomers, it is clear that the Balkan pair's road to EU prosperity and stability will be harder. The only question is how much.

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Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)